Fun and games with Remote Desktop, today, Microsoft's latest incarnation of
the venerable Terminal Services system. We've always used
pcAnywhere for dialup support of the salesmen's laptops in the past, but as
the sales force swells the licensing costs have swelled to match, and when I
described Remote Desktop in a recent management briefing document on XP and .Net
they seemed to fasten onto the idea like remora onto a shark. Unfortunately I
didn't have the facilities to actually test it at the time, but a fairly
thorough scan over the popular tech support boards showed that it was widely
used and without any problems that didn't stem from basic user idiocy...

I did test it after I completed the "model build" of the first sales
laptop for the desktop team to
image and distribute, giving my new .Net RC1 server its first workout at the
same time, and it seemed to be fine - possibly even a touch faster than VNC over
the LAN, and although I didn't like the way that it logs out the remote user, it
certainly seemed useable. After a few weeks, though, I started hearing rumours
of problems, and as the new laptops proliferated the rumours turned into
outright bitching - in the end, the desktop team even resorted to sneakily
installing pcAnywhere into the standard build when I wasn't looking, which
caused various
spin-off problems to further confuse the issue.

I was baffled, as although on my systems I could hardly make it fail, on the
desktop support PCs they could hardly make it work! The problem achieved
critical mass yesterday, though, and after a word from my manager I spent most
of today successfully connecting to a poor, hapless laptop under widely
differing conditions - although all the tests by a member of the desktop team
still disconnected the dialup connection. At the end of the day I still don't
understand the cause, but I think I've at least isolated a pattern - connecting
to the XP Pro client from a .Net server is fine, as is connecting from Win2000
and Win98 systems... but the desktop team are using XP Pro themselves, and that
combination seems to hang up the remote system's dialup connection just as it
initiates the Remote Desktop connection. I really can't imagine why - so until I
get a clue I stuffed Win 2000 onto
a spare mini-server to keep them going, as blood pressures were rising
visibly... Odd stuff.

Here's something more
interesting - another milestone towards the development of a fully-immersive
interface. Teams working in England and the US have succeeded in transmitting
sensations over the Internet, with two scientists working together to "pick
up" a computer-generated cube.

"The experiment went very well," said Joel Jordan, part of a team of
scientists at University College London (UCL) which has teamed up with
colleague at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to conduct the
experiment. "You can actually feel the object being pushed against your hand,"
he told Reuters. "We can feel each others' forces... You can feel how rough
something is, or how springy the side of the cube is, you can hit each other
hard enough to leave little bruises."

The killer app for this
technology, when its derivatives finally arrive at the consumer market, is
extremely obvious...

Elsewhere, here's another spam-baiter,
conversing at length with
one of the prevalent Nigerian Fee email scammers. It's inventive stuff, and
worth reading through to the outrageous conclusion...

Network Associates have finally released a new version of their
Thin Client corporate anti-virus software, bringing the first updates and
bug-fixes since the product was released over two years ago. Their strategy for
the TC has been extremely confusing, unfortunately - when we first installed the
ePolicy Orchestrator antivirus management system we were assured that
the TC was absolutely the bee's knees for use with ePO and we'd be stark,
staring mad to even consider using anything else for desktop protection... and
then they clammed-up for a long, long time, completely ignoring the lightweight
client in favour of their feature-rich
VirusScan 4.5 series - which spawned service packs, hotfixes, updates and
finally WinXP support while the TC languished alone and unloved. They finally
broke the silence a few weeks ago, though, when a representative of the company
mentioned to my manager that the TC had only been written at the insistence of
one of their enterprise customers (my guess is British Airways, a notorious
early-adopter of the ePO) and that it would not be much longer for this world...
This was annoying, but it wouldn't have been too awkward to replace it
with VScan 4.5.1 and having a single client for all the company's systems was
certainly appealing. An abrupt reverse emerged today, though, along with the 6.1
version of the Thin Client - several documented bug-fixes and, at last, support
for WinXP even if not .Net Server... So I stuffed it into the software
repository and sent it out to a small, carefully-selected group of test systems
for a couple of weeks of holding it up to the light and frowning at it...

Unfortunately, I did something wrong - I think the directory inheritance was
enabled by default, for a change, and before I even realised what was going on
the management server had upgraded forty-eight client PCs and was busily working
on the rest... Unfortunately, again, I hadn't configured the installer
properties at that stage and the auto-reboot-on-completion feature was enabled -
so users suddenly found their PCs shutting down in front of their eyes and a
moment later all the phones on the helpdesk started ringing at once... I was
mortified about this, of course, as it was a truly butt-stupid thing to have
done - but my PFY thought it was hilarious when I told him: "So, you are
human after all!" Well, I probably make many more mistakes than he
realises, as there are definite advantages to being a sysadmin when it comes to
covering one's tracks
and snowing any affected users with
techno-babble - but these
abuses of power only go so far, and I've yet to learn any way of concealing five
hundred PCs rebooting spontaneously...

There will be a fair bit of checking and tidying to be done tomorrow, as in
my subsequent hurry to nail down the new version's configuration I simplified
the directory by uninstalling the old version - forgetting that the various
system-wide tasks running on the server itself were keyed to the software
performing them and so would disappear along with it. Fortunately I've built an
ePO installation from the ground up four or five times, now, and the details
came back to me quickly enough - although the proof of the pudding will come
tomorrow morning when I see if it performed all of its overnight update tasks
properly. <crossing fingers>

I found an interesting little chain of information, last night. A link at
NT Compatible took me to an article on
current hacking threats, and a little research on the scary intrusion tools
mentioned there took me to the homepage of security guru
Dan Kaminsky. Among the articles there is a
quick review
of Passfaces, a method of authenticating a login by recognising a series of
faces chosen in advance as a form of password. I participated in a online trial
of this technology last year, and now it seems to have been released as a
commercial authentication system. As a network sysadmin, I'm always
interested in alternative authentication methods and my own experience shows
that the Passfaces concept is certainly a valid one - unlike the current state
of fingerprint recognition technology, which can often be compromised using
nothing more exotic than a jelly
sweet...

Elsewhere, CD Baby is a web-based
independent record label with a catalogue of over 26,000 artists and groups -
including such gems as Rondellus,
a Lithuanian band who play covers of Black Sabbath songs, sung in Latin and
played on medieval instruments... "Can you imagine what Black Sabbath
would have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill
Ward would have formed the band in the 14th century?" Hmmm.
Fortunately I don't have to strain my imagination too far, as CD Baby provides
copious samples in RealAudio format. It's... uh... different.

China is rapidly becoming a significant manufacturer of PC go-faster
accessories (all my rounded IDE drive cables are from Akasa, for example), and
Directron have just
published some photos of new products taken at recent trade shows in the
Pacific Rim. Four pages of sleek, shiny things to look out for in the spring...

Much too late for Weasel Day on the 22nd, I know, but here's Scott Adams' Fun
With Weasels, a promotion for his new Dilbert book. <smiles> That name
always makes me think of Deep Throat 2, now...

I found out today that the fans for the new servers hadn't even been
ordered, yet, so I threw caution to the winds and made the most of what
appeared to be a relatively quiet afternoon to rearrange the five PCs in my
little corner of the office... And once they were all in a heap on the floor, of
course all hell broke loose on the network. I managed to cope with the problems
while simultaneously installing the new servers, and finished up with just
enough time to wash my hands before making a grateful exit for the weekend. I'd
like to say that it will be free from malfunctioning computers, but somehow it
doesn't seem very likely...

Ah, now that's more like it! Everything has been smooth, peaceful and quiet
today, so I spent the whole day flat-out finishing one of the new servers while
I had the opportunity. As soon as the fans arrive (a pair of basic 92mm Akasas
for each server - front/low and back/high in the textbook layout) I'll throw
both boxes under my desk and with the W2K system to handle the day-to-day chores
I can build the .Net system in my copious free time. I smiled sweetly at the
desktop guys, too, and they've promised me a matched set of black keyboards,
mice and 17" monitors from the latest shipment of Dell workstations.
Cosmetics are a significant feature in corporate IT, these days, it seems!

I've just finished Chapter House Dune, the final volume of
Frank Herbert's original series. I
didn't find the last few books nearly as dire as some have implied, and while
they're a very different animal from the earlier novels they've definitely been
an interesting and thought-provoking read. Somewhat to my surprise (I'm always
very slow to realise these things) the series turns out to be a political
treatise, comparing and contrasting forms of government and the types of
personalities that they create among both governors and governed. I found the
end of Chapter House to be rather anti-climatic, though - Herbert spent
many thousand pages creating the apocalyptic confrontation between Bene Gesserit
and Honoured Matres, and then it all seemed to fizzle out, leaving me mulling
over his final thoughts on invasion and conquest... The subjugated always
prevail, in the long run at least, assimilating or merging with the conquerors
to form a hybrid - and it is because of this mingling of cultures and societies
that civilization flourishes.

Taken together with the more recent addition of son Brian Herbert's
collaborations with Kevin Anderson, the Dune series now forms a massive and
complex body of work - and
is highly recommended, here. I shall start on their lengthy Butlerian Jihadprequel soon,
travelling from one end of the Dune timeline to the other, and I'm
expecting to enjoy the journey.

A disturbing start to the day, as the computer room air conditioning failed
sometime overnight and the place was like an oven when I opened the door...
We've had problems with the aircon in the UPS room, but this is the first time
that the primary unit has died and, with some of the servers' internal
temperatures as high as 50° this morning I very much hope that it's the last.
Most of the morning was spent opening (and later closing again) all the
cabinets, chassis panels, access bays, windows, etc, and in carrying portable
fans up and down from the main office. The afternoon was spent in a fruitless
wait for the aircon engineer, but at least I managed to use the otherwise dead
time to make a little more progress on my new workstations. What a day...

Otway's hit, Bunsen Burner, is still hanging onto the charts by its
fingernails - number 43, this third week, and I reckon he might survive one more
week in the top 100 before obscurity claims him again. Not bad!

I have new servers to play with, this week - weeee! My manager returned from
leave and decided that the two matched servers we inherited last week are indeed
surplus to requirements - and as the desktop team have been nagging me to
replace my workstations (a pair of aging Dell PIIs and the only surviving
Gateway mini-tower in the company) for months, he decided that I should have
them.

I was quite taken with the idea, as they're certainly a very respectable spec
for management workstations - 50Gb of SCSI-3 RAID5, a DDS4 tape drive, 512Mb RAM
and a 1GHz PIII with room for a second - and best of all they're an exactly
matched pair! I flirted with the idea of clustering them just for fun, but in
the end I've decided to install one with 2000 Server and the other with .Net
RC1, dividing the management tools between them to see just what I'm letting
myself in for next year with a mixed network...

I won't tailor them too much, though, as in an emergency they could easily be
put to use helping to run the LAN. My previous disaster-recovery strategy
involved pressing a couple of my home systems into use, but in the event of a
fire or flood localised to the server-room these new systems could easily be
tweaked to provide DNS and DHCP services, host the Active Directory, or provide
file and print services. I'm somewhat relieved, as there is still no sign of a
formal DR contract and I don't think my colleagues are quite ready for INFINITY2...

They do need a few more fans, though - they were built for a
temperature-controlled environment, and life under my desk in the main office is
going to be too harsh for the single 80mm PSU fan to endure. The full tower case
has all the usual fan attachment points, though, so I'll pick up some basic
Sunons or something from CPC and add some more CFM. <grunt>
More power!

This is worth a look: a wide selection of
American music from
the 1920s to the 1960s, burned onto compilation CDs for 2$ per track plus
shipping. Possibly a touch expensive for more the contemporary music,
especially when compared to the sadly-defunct CD Now, but probably an excellent
way of acquiring a taste of the older and less usual - I wouldn't mind a disc or
two of the 30s big bands, I think.

The blue end connector must be at the host
adaptor
The grey middle connector must hold a slave
device or be empty
The black end connector must hold a master device

And these are not just guidelines - if you do it differently, be prepared for
odd and aberrant behaviour - drive activity LEDs permanently on, strange freezes
during removable device operations, and sub-optimal transfer rates right across
the IDE subsystem. And I know, as I've just cured all these symptoms by
correcting my earlier mistakes - so you have been warned...

I've spent most of today performing open heart surgery on
INFINITY2 - replacing the DigiDoc,
swapping some tape and CD devices around as above, and sleeving and tidying the
last few wires. The inside of the case still looks rather busy, but I
guess there are so many devices etc to connect that it's never going to be
possible to hide all the wiring away out of sight.

I'm pleased with what I did today, however, and have now declared Phase I of
the project officially complete. Phase II, tentatively scheduled for the spring,
will include adding an extra pair of lights and upgrading the RAID subsystem.
I've chosen the likely hardware for the latter (a Promise FastTrak SX4000
controller coupled to four Western Digital WD1000JB disks), and in another few
months it's likely to be a little more affordable.

I was searching for wallpaper in an odd moment, last night, and came across
the home page of Infinitee
Designs - they have a whole raft of freely downloadable SF and fantasy
wallpaper, predefined Photoshop actions, Bryce models and scenes, and for those
with an artistic bent it's worth a browse around to see if anything appeals.

If I get any more deliveries at work I'll start thinking that christmas has
come early... Today's was a new multi-slot mailbox for the PowerVault tape
library - not the six slot unit I'd been expecting but instead a twelve slot
monster! I'm not sure if it was ordered in error or delivered in
error, but either way it's firmly bolted to the library now and is not coming
off again.

BackupExec didn't take very kindly to having eighteen new slots to keep track
of, though, especially as the new set started at 1, renumbering all the existing
ones accordingly up to the original maximum and so vanishing half of my backup
tapes... As I write this I'm dialled in from home waiting for the server to
reboot after a device driver refresh, and hopefully then it will re-enumerate
the slots and discover my tapes again.

This particular server is the company's main working file store (around
140Gb) as well as being the backup server, as it's always made sense to me to
keep the backup local to the greatest bulk of data - but one of the drawbacks of
this approach is that it has an unusual number of SCSI and fibre channel
interfaces. Waiting at home watching the PING -T trace while it reboots can be a
nail-biting experience, with a lot of "Request timed out" responses
scrolling up the screen while it's scanning it's various busses and loading it's
various BIOSs...

It was a routine restart today, though, and successfully fixed the problem -
the new slots were properly recognised and inventoried and all appeas stable and
settled... with three minutes to spare before the beginning of tonight's
scheduled backup window - the jobs would have started as soon as the server did,
anyway, but it's a matter of pride. :-)

No rest for the wicked this weekend, though, with a DigiDoc to swap out and
the mysterious drive LED to debug - and while I'm in there I might as well
finish the last oddments of cable-tidying so that I can "officially" complete
Phase I. Busy busy...

A day of many deliveries, with the new fire safe and a pair of servers
"donated" by a company we've just acquired arriving almost simultaneously. The
safe is huge and capacious, and the servers similar - they're from some no-name
box-shifter, but built with good, industry-standard components throughout -
Intel ServerWorks dual PIII motherboard, Adaptec SCSI RAID with four 18Gb
Seagate LVD disks, a DDS4 DAT tape drive... nice stuff, all mounted neatly in an
Addtronics full tower case (very similar to INFINITY's
old clothes) and running Windows
2000 Server. What we didn't have, though, was the admin password, and so
my PFY and I ended up in a race - he was trying to resurrect the dead company's
tech support team on the phone while I was trying to hack my way in.
:-)

I went straight for Petter Nordahl-Hagen's marvellous
NT password and registry
editor, recently updated with many more SCSI drivers, but I was still
puzzling over the I20 RAID channels when he managed to retrieve the password via
traditional social engineering methods about twenty minutes later... But I think
I was almost there, having just succeeded in mounting the system partition but
still unable to discover exactly where Windows was installed and so unable to
open the SAM. One of the standard Windows security tips is to install to
a differently named directory, and I can really see now how that can help in
sufficiently adverse circumstances - a hacker would probably still be stood in
front of that server, trying endless possibilities: \Win2K? \Windows2000?
\Win2000? \William? It's obviously an extremely useful last-ditch measure for at
least slowing down unauthorised access even when physical security has
been completely compromised.

A touch of DIY this evening, modifying the cable management arm from the new
Dell server to accommodate the KVM interface module. These are matchbox-sized
pods connecting to the VGA port, with flying leads for keyboard and mouse, and
on these particular servers it prevents the cable arm from folding up completely
- which, in turn, prevents the cabinet's rear door from closing properly. The
solution was fairly obvious, though - throw the warranty to the winds and remove
a carefully-measured section of the U-shaped tray to leave adequate clearance
for both the KVM pod and it's attached CAT5 data cable:

I reached for the Dremel, initially, but even the reinforced cutting disks
were making little impression on the steel and in the end a hacksaw turned out
to be a better tool for the job, with the Dremel to smooth away the sharp edges.
One touch of black paint later, and even a Dell engineer would think it kosher..

Back at work to discover that a new server had arrived for the intranet
upgrade, together with a freebie - a
full-height Dell cabinet that I suddenly had to find a home for in an
already over-crowded computer room. I think we'll have to migrate the PABX out
into the car-park if this goes on...

Also due for delivery is a third
fire safe
for the overflow of LTO tapes, which will necessitate stacking the existing,
smaller pair on top of each other... Each weighs 108 kg, so I've rounded up my
PFY and a pair of the desktop support guys and we'll have a stab at it tomorrow
morning - hopefully before the new one arrives, as the delivery drivers are
usually rather short on patience and at 265kg it's pretty much going to have to
stay wherever it's put.

A Lego harpsichord?
Clever, but see previous note about hands and too much time...

NASA's Human Spaceflight
pages have some nice images and animations of the evolution of the
International Space Station, updated after
this week's construction mission installed a new section of the 110m Truss
Structure that will support the solar panels and cooling radiators. Look in the
sidebar under "Station Imagery" and, especially, "Interactive"...

I took a day of spontaneous holiday, today, and have been fiddling with the
new VXA-1 tape drive. I get around 180Mb/min from the local disk and around
140Mb/min over the network for write operations, slightly slower for reads - all
in all, about ten gigabytes per hour, which is very respectable from a tape
drive at the sub-£500 price point... I'd have to spend in excess of £2000 to
significantly increase either performance or capacity.

What I don't get, however, is any significant hardware compression -
Backup Exec reports that it is in use, but if so it isn't having any effect, and
the PC also experiences strange pauses during tape mounts and rewinds when
hardware compression is enabled. Enabling software compression instead gives my
customary 1.2:1 - 1.6:1 ratio depending on data, a slightly higher write speed,
and the pauses aren't nearly so obtrusive. I had the pausing problem with the
Seagate Travan drive in certain configurations, too, and suspect that it's an
issue with the ATAPI interface both drives use stalling a driver originally
designed to cope with SCSI operations - I'm trying to work out how to separate
the tape drive onto it's own IDE channel, but that will involve moving a disk
volume from the onboard controller to the Promise RAID card and that leads me
into thinking of upgrading the RAID subsystem again... It's a vicious circle.

I've also discovered that the PC is the source of some rather annoying
television interference on two of the five broadcast channels. I'd wondered
about the effect of the side windows on EMI, and this confirms it - so I'll
either have to live with it it, or find some way of screening the windows with
fine mesh. Ho hum.

I noticed that the orange backlight on the DigiDoc fan controller was
flickering a little yesterday, and so I wasn't surprised to find it completely
dead when I got up this morning. This could have been problematic, as it's an
integral part of my PC, but Kustom
immediately offered to send a replacement up-front together with a
postage-paid label for me to send back the faulty unit - in spite of being in
the middle of moving their office this week! Their customer service is
faultless, really, and in strong contrast to one of their slightly larger UK
competitors, who sent me the wrong cable three times in a row without apology or
any offer of refunding the postage. I won't be shopping there again, especially
with Kustom expanding their
product range weekly... on the web, it's easier than ever to vote with your
feet.

Elsewhere, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zaid al-Nahayan, a government minister in the
of the United Arab Emirates, has
spoken out in
criticism of the all-pervasive Internet censorship imposed by his own department
of Information and Culture.

"Knowledge is the right of the citizen before it is the right of the
government to prevent the citizen from the means of acquiring knowledge," he
told an information and communications conference in Dubai, one of the
emirates in the UAE.

An interesting and surprising viewpoint, certainly, and rather reminiscent of
James Ferman's stance in his
final years at the BBFC. I have the
feeling that Sheikh Abullah's eventual fate may well be similar to Ferman's,
too...

Sonny Barger, as
I live and breathe! The legendry Hell's Angel's founder and spokesman is in
London, this week, visiting with the UK Angels - he's 64 now, but still looks
lean and mean enough to carry it off. Surprisingly, though, I hadn't heard that
his larynx was removed during cancer surgery 20 years ago - I guess he speaks
with one of those buzzers, now, and somehow I just can't see that restoring
order in an over-heated Angels clubhouse...

An odd decision
on the part of tape drive manufacturer Exabyte, now amalgamated with Ecrix - the
manufacturer of my new VXA. They have decided that offering tech support by
email is not "effective", and so now are offering only telephone support - and
it's not even a free-phone number in the UK! I'm really ticked off about that,
as from my point of view telephone support is massively less convenient and more
time consuming. When I raise a call by email, I can include all the diagnostic
logs, firmware revisions, operating system details etc etc and it's all there at
their fingertips if they need it - that simply can't be replicated over the
phone, and it's going to be a whole bunch more fuss if other manufacturers adopt
the same policy. I'm especially ticked off that they've done this right
now, though, as since I installed the new tape drive one of my disk activity
LEDs has been on permanently and I really wanted to ask them about it.

For various reasons I've just spent a while researching the history of the
famous folk ballad Matty Groves. The modern version of the song, a
standard for Fairport Convention and others for many years now, seems to be a
composite of several earlier American versions of the song. The original English
version, documented by Child as Ballad #81, was entitled "Little Musgrave and
Lady Barnard", but actually seems more similar to Joan Baez's rendition than
anything I've heard by contemporary English bands. It's interesting to see how
the name "Barnard" has evolved over the years, too - far more common these days
are Darnell, Arlen, Arnold and Donald... the word has so obviously been
misheard en route and I can't think of anything that illustrates so clearly the
oral tradition of folk songs. Marvellous...

Oh, and just for the completist -
here
is Matty Groves translated by
Babelfish from English to German and then back again. I've said it before,
and I'll say it again: some people have far too much time on their hands.

I've been waiting for a fresh batch of LTO backup tapes, at work, and they
finally arrived this morning. Half my life seems to have revolved around backup
and data safety, recently - I'm still tweaking the jukebox and software at the
office, and shaking down the new VXA tape drive at home whilst idly thinking
about new RAID arrays... Sometimes I wonder if having reliable, complete data
backups isn't more important even than the stability and performance of the
servers hosting the data.

So, the morning was spent unpeeling a crate of LTO tapes from their nested
layers of cellophane, sticking their barcode labels on and stuffing them all
into the library's copious slots - and I'm still unable to decide if I
should persevere with the current media set-based rotation strategy or switch to
a slot-based one. There are compelling advantages to each with respect to ease
of management, and I can't predict which will be best in the long run... Gah!

The new Ecrix VXA-1
tape drive finally arrived a few days ago, and I stuffed it into the case last
night. I use the word "stuffed" advisedly, as my PC is now pretty much full...
all the 5¼" bays, all the PCI slots (even the one shared with the AGP card -
hah!) all the DIMM sockets, and all the IDE channels. Well, I could hang
another pair of drives from the Promise RAID controller, but only in a 0+1
configuration and so probably not worth the effort. I may upgrade to their
current RAID-5 hardware * at some point, but that would be a fairly major
project and I really feel that I should take a break from it all for a
while. I have to do something about finishing off the internal cabling,
though - nearly all of them are neatly braided or wrapped, but they're still in
a dreadful mess and shoving everything this-way-and-that to install the tape
drive has not helped.

The drive installed painlessly enough, although a silly error early on
allowed me to test my theory that under many circumstances it doesn't actually
matter which way around you install high-speed IDE cables. I was wrong, it
seems, at least for my configuration of devices, and had to open everything up
again to turn it around... It's very quiet in use, which I like, but it's taking
me a while to get used to the traditional green LEDs in the front panel.
Hmmm...

The first test, with the native Windows drivers and backup app, was faultless
and at 2.7 MB/sec the drive seems to be running at close to the theoretical
maximum. Backup Exec recognised the drive readily enough, in spite of the lack
of documented compatibility for this particular flavour of VXA, but although the
basics are working well I seem to be having a problem with data compression. The
drive supports it in hardware, and Backup Exec reports that it is enabled and in
use, but my full-tape test bombed out at a little less than the stated capacity
of 33Gb. I know that my data set is compressible, as BE managed software
compression at around 1.6:1 with the Travan drive, so this certainly needs
investigating.

(*) Promise's
new
baby looks pretty slick, actually - four independent channels each
supporting an ATA/133 drive, capable of RAID 5 (with parity calculated in
hardware) as well as the usual mirroring and spanning, and up to 256Mb of SDRAM
cache to put the icing on the cake. It seems to be around £110 right now, which
seems extremely reasonable - with four of Western Digital's
exceptional WD2000JB drives, you could bring 600Gb of safe, high-speed
storage online for less than a grand...

Happy birthday Otway! "Bunsen Burner"
went straight into the charts at
number nine, which far
exceeded anyone's expectations, and buoyed-up by that last night's gig
was extremely well-received. Otway was exuberant, of course, but looked
tired - his schedule over the last few weeks must have been punishing even for a
veteran club player, from what I've read on the Otway mailing list -
television interviews, book and CD signings at various record shops around
the country,
promotional spots at radio stations and newspapers, and generally plugging
himself and pressing the flesh. So there weren't quite as many guitar-playing
somersaults, the trademarked leap from a tall step-ladder wasn't as
death-defying as I remembered, the microphone head-butts somewhat more
subdued... Of course, I mustn't forget that he's fifty - when I last saw him, at
college, he was a mere stripling of thirty-four and younger than I am now!

The music was outstanding, though, and with the benefit of an excellent
sound-mix - loud without being deafening, foot-stompingly bassy without muffling
the wailing guitars - I haven't heard music in the London Palladium before, but
from the stalls the acoustics were certainly pleasing.

The first half of the gig was something of a motley. After enthusing with the
audience for a while, Otway plunged into a handful of his classics, ably
supported by his current group The Big Band - with a full drum kit and a
pair of guitars, they certainly bring a fatter feel to the old favourites
than his traditional journeyman
guitarists ever managed in the nineties. As usual, Otway didn't restrict
himself to conventional musical instruments - an old faithful, synth-drum pads
in his trouser pockets, was as delicious as ever, and his more recent addition,
a slick modern Theramin (a birthday present from fans a couple of years ago) has
all the hallmarks of being a worthy addition - for a performer who flails and
thrashes his limbs as much as Otway, the Theramin is a perfect instrument...

I'd been hoping that Wild Willy Barrett could be persuaded to share a stage
with The Aylesbury Madman again, and wasn't disappointed... he's older, and
fatter, and grey-haired, and somehow looks even shorter next to the gangling
Otway than he used to - but he still plays fiddle as if he's trying to saw it in
half, bunches of severed strands flapping from the ends of his bow... They
really tore into the old tracks, and it was great to see him again...
Next Barrett played a few songs with his new band,
Sleeping Dogz - a pleasing
folk-punk fusion that certainly bears keeping an eye on.

Then, as the stage was being cleared, the pair fell right back into their old
routine from the early eighties - standing together at the microphone with
Barrett's arm draped around around Otway's neck, battering his forehead into the
microphone whenever it seemed funny... Ah, nostalgia... I was sorry that they
didn't play more together, and had especially hoped for Racing Cars, a
firm favoutite - but Otway And Barrett as a duo will always be the "real" line
up, in my heart.

I've noticed peripherally that Dr Feelgood are still
active and touring in spite of the death
of cornerstone Lee Brilleaux, but I wasn't expecting to see one of their
guitarists filling out Otway's Big Band line-up on keyboards before their
own set. I've never been especially fond of The Feelgoods, as it happens, but
the three or four tracks they delivered on Sunday night were great R&B,
and fitted in just right. The other Big Band members seem to play elsewhere on a
more regular basis - accomplished lead guitarist Richard Holgarth fronts
heavy-rock band We-Evil, drummer Adam Batterbee and guitarist Murray
Torkildsen play with The Sweeney... Perhaps Otway's pace is still too
hectic for the youth of today to cope with full-time, but from their solo spots
they are clearly all talented musicians.

The second half of the gig was pure Otway - a generous handful of unfamiliar
songs, as he's obviously still writing, but mostly the old standards and
bastardised covers... The audience had a ball, as did a very tired-looking Otway
- there were smiles all-round on stage, and as the finale the entire ensemble of
musicians, singers and oddments (about forty in all, I'd say - it was a crowded
night!) demonstrated a disco routine specially choreographed to match the old
Disco Inferno riff that Bunsen Burner is set to.

Unfortunately there won't be an official video of the gig, as The Palladium
apparently wanted too much money for the rights - but I live in hope of a
bootleg, and there are some excellent unofficial photos of the evening
here. And, of course,
as a genuine chart sensation Otway will be performing "The Hit" on Top Of The
Pops this Thursday. Hah!

So, it's John Otway's 50th Birthday Anniversary Gig, tonight - the new hit,
"Bunsen Burner", has been in the shops for a week and is apparently selling
well... It's been twenty-five years since his last chart success, Cor,
Baby, that's Really Free, and it would be so sweet if
this afternoon's
chart shows that his army of loyal fans has provided a second hit to
celebrate. Crossing fingers!

I've just read an
interesting
and detailed review of the new consumer Linux distribution,
Lindows. Based on the Debian build, it's
been heavily customised to be approachable and unthreatening for end users, and
although according to the reviewer it's certainly not perfect in this first
release, it's certainly worth investigating if one fancies a change from
Windows. Interestingly, having checked back on it's ideological predecessor,
Armed Linux, it appears that it has been
quietly bought by Lindows Inc at some point - so it's not only Microsoft
that sneakily gobbles up the competition, then?

I discovered a picture that I'd overlooked, last night, so updated the
last page of the
INFINITY2 article with a
gratuitous image of a pair of beautiful, shiny CPUs. Enjoy...

A new version of
Cache
Sentry has been released, and it will be interesting to see if it works any
better than the last one. It's a little utility to manage Internet Explorer's
recently-viewed pages cache, and as well as managing the cache size
rather better than IE itself, it fixes several bugs which can cause wildly
aberrant browsing behaviour.

IE's entire cache subsystem seems to have been slightly broken since version
three (as I recall the first release to use more of Microsoft's new code than of
the original Spyglass Mosaic) and unfortunately it seems to be getting worse
rather than better. The problem commonly manifests itself by triggering a reload
of web pages from the net even when they really ought to have been loaded
from the cache - in extreme cases even clicking the "Back" button will cause a
fresh download, which is extremely annoying over dialup! Predictably, it also
plays havoc with any attempts (especially under Win9x) to synchronise pages for
offline viewing, as some or all of the cached content can spontaneously
disappear.

A reboot will often cure the symptoms of the browsing issue, as will clearing
the cache through IE (in more seriously damaged systems deleting the entire
cache manually to force a rebuild of the INDEX.DAT file, afterwards) but I've
come across several PCs which had endless problems with all things
cache-related.

The "Random Deletion" bug has it's origins all the way back in IE3 - rather
than picking the oldest or least-frequently files used to delete when the cache
starts to become full, the manager apparently throws out anything that catches
its eye. It's not quite random, apparently, but certainly appears so.

The "Stray File" bug is less annoying in use, but harder to detect and
correct before it fills up your system partition... If a page transfer is
aborted in mid download, under some circumstances the images and objects already
downloaded are not recognised by the cache manager and just sit forlornly in the
Temporary Internet Files folder - they're never deleted, even by a forced
purge of the cache, and if left unchecked will accumulate for years.

The latest release of Cache Sentry also claims to fix a third bug -
apparently the cache manager sometimes fails to calculate the total size of the
locally-stored files correctly, which can also lead to early or unexpected
deletions of cached content. I'm hoping that this fix will help the most
problematic system I came across - it certainly sounds plausible, and the new
cookie management feature might be worth investigating too.

I finally decided to upgrade to Internet Explorer 6, only to find soon
afterwards that the SP1 version was released a few weeks ago, so I'm writing
this between reboots... The cookie management stuff looks quite promising, and I
took the opportunity to throw caution to the winds and delete the lot of 'em to
start with a clean slate.

It was a bitch of a day, though - virus scares, a glitch in remote email
connectivity, a surprise printer engineer, a panic over the Windows XP disk
image we're designing for roll-out next week, my PFY still on holiday and my
manager seriously distracted by his pregnant wife's imminent delivery... and to
top it all off I was playing with a wonderful new
server
monitoring tool that ended up crashing the main server in the middle of the
day. :-(

I wonder if I'm still young enough to cross-train into another career...
brick-laying, perhaps...

I've more-or-less completed the INFINITY2
pages, now. I'll probably add some more links to the text, but it's enough for
now. Phew!

I had a spare moment at work today, and having a head-full of Active
Directory and Windows XP I upgraded one of my spare Windows 2000 servers to the
recent .Net Release Candidate 1. It was a fairly painless process, and as it
apparently didn't feel the need to enable most of the new interface, I'm left
with a fully working development server with a handful of interesting new
gimmicks. The only application compatibility issue so far, an unpatched version
of MSDE, was clearly diagnosed, cleanly trapped by the OS and easily fixed by
the latest SQL Server update. Bonza!

I gather that Microsoft's own public web servers are already running under
.Net RC1, and the smart money seems to think that it's well on track for an
end-of-year release. This coincides pretty well with my plan to install it on
all our servers in Q1/Q2, and I'm cautiously starting to get a good feeling
about this...